Frank Den Oudsten

FRANK DEN OUDSTEN | NL

Frank den Oudsten is a media artist and a professor of scenography, attached to various universities and academies of art throughout Europe. He studied applied physics and received his degree with a research project at the studio for electronic music at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, which meant a paradigm shift in his orientation. The field of audiovisual design became forefront, supported by courses in photography and film, of which the workshops by the experimental filmmaker Frans Zwartjes were most impressive. His professional career emcompasses both complex multimedia installations within the context of exhibitions, as performative experiments on stage. Commissioners have been the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, the Municipal Museum of The Hague, the Rijksmuseum Kröller Müller in Otterlo, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the German Museum of Architecture in Frankfurt am Main, the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, among others.

In his presentations, Frank den Oudsten both uses classical analog as well as advanced digital media and mind-mapping tools. His projects define the place of performance as a locus with character and identity, through the crucial unity of content and form, in which cognition and intuition are considered to be equal. In recent years the emphasis of his work has almost entirely been on discourse within the context of educational projects, workshops and symposiums. His improvisations on stage however, increasingly got a performative touch. That instant, right-brain format allowed for a playful testing of his conceptual hypotheses, before they appeared in print. Reversely, text, deeply affected by the open nature of improvisation, turned into a stream of speculative theory. His publication on the theory of narrative space will be launched early 2011, by Ashgate Publishing Ltd in London. Its title: „Space.Time. Narrative, the exhibition as post-spectacular stage“.

Statement
Talking about scenography... what the hell is it? what do you think it does? how does it affect me, once it’s done?


http://www.frankdenoudsten.nl